Auer PolicySciencesofSocialMedia

The Policy Studies Journal, Vol. 39, No.
4, 2011
The Policy Sciences of Social Media

Matthew R. Auer
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Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are increasingly touted as platforms not merely for networks of friends and for private diversion, but as vehicles that allow ordinary people to enter and inuence the many arenas of public life. On the surface, the disparate and shapeless population of i-reporters, policy tweeters, and anonymous news web site commentators would appear to challenge the comparatively well-dened cast of professional diplomats, journalists, and propagandists that Harold D. Lasswell identied as policy-oriented communicators. However, to illuminate the roles and impacts of social media in politics and policymaking, insights from Lasswells science of communication must be embedded in Lasswells broader lessons on value assets and outcomes. A closer look at the so-called democratizing functions of social media in politics reveals the inuence of powerful intermediaries who lter and shape electronic communications. Lasswells insights on the likelihood of increased collaboration among political elites and skilled, modernizing intellectuals anticipates contemporary instances of state actors who recruit skilled creators and users of social mediacollaborations that may or may not advance experiments in democracy. Lasswells decision process concept is deployed to discover social medias strengths and weaknesses for the practicing policy scientist.
KEY WORDS: policy sciences, social process, decision process, Harold D. Lasswell, social media, tag clouds, e-communication
Introduction Harold D. Lasswell, cofounder (with Myres S. McDougal) of the policy sciences, was deeply interested in the science of communication. Lasswell explored the processes and outcomes of information collection, manipulation, and transmission, and effects on various audiences (Lasswell, 1946a, 1946b, 1948). In the twenty-rst century, the proliferation of electronic social media portals, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn, deployed on laptops and handheld mobile devices, are new, powerful communication tools capable of inuencing users opinions in the realms of politics and policy. Lasswells science of communication and, more broadly, core concepts from his policy sciences framework can be deployed to clarify how these emerging technologies can and do inuence important policy decisions. Mainstream news media endeavor to document the scale and speed of the social media revolution without considering, in systematic fashion, the outcomes and
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0190-292X 2011 Policy Studies Organization Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ.
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effects of this revolution, particularly in the policy arena. To wit, in its 2010 Person of the Year cover story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Time Magazine declares, In less than seven years, Zuckerberg wired together a twelfth of humanity into a single network, thereby creating a social entity almost twice as large as the U.S. If Facebook were a country it would be the third largest, behind only China and India. It started out as a lark, a diversion. . . . We are now running our social lives through a for-prot network that, on paper at least, has made Zuckerberg a billionaire six times over. (Grossman, 2010) Facebooks breathtaking growth, the sheer number of its users, and the riches and attention garnered by its inventor, while impressive, are less interesting for policy purposes than are the possible and actual consequences of the medium on politics and public affairs. In examining social media, the present concern considers public affairs, not the private affairs of networks of friends and family. In their early incarnations, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media were especially apt for sharing content of private value, and indeed, much current content is of no particular policy value. However, social medias functions have evolved in that they no longer serve merely as platforms for favorite recipes, videos of family trips, or chatter about the latest ofce scandal. A recipe for a bomb casing can be as easily uploaded to a popular blog as can a recipe for a pie shell. A YouTube video of a citizen beaten by police during a disputed presidential election (YouTube, 2010) is likely to get more hits than a vacationing familys video found on the same portal. And tweets about the latest ofce scuttlebutt seem parochial and trivial when compared with the fallout, on Twitter, after a big city mayor responds lackadaisically to a major winter blizzard (National Public Radio, 2010). To date, popular media have hinted that their upstart cousins, social media, have inuence over politics and policy (Gross, 2011; Preston, 2011; Shane, 2011). Lasswells approach, particularly his social process and decision process, offers a systematic way to dene, categorize, and gauge these consequences. His developmental constructs envisage potential future functions of social media in the policy process. In the sections to follow, social media are dened, and their functions in public affairs are revealed, drawing on data in the eld. Lasswells science of communication and its value for functional (as opposed to conventional) analysis are considered. Lasswells value categories, the social process, decision process, and developmental constructs are arrayed against current and possible future uses of social media in public affairs. Social Media, Politics, and Policymaking This essay draws on Harold D. Lasswells policy sciences to clarify current and possible future functions of social media in public affairs. Social media are electronic communication platforms that convey content generated and exchanged by networks of users (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). They are wide ranging in form and purpose. Tang and Liu (2010, p. 1) offer a snapshot of social media functions and
Auer: Policy Sciences of Social Media Table 1. Social Media, Circa 2010 Forms of Social Media Blogs Forum Media sharing Microblogs Social networks Illustrative Platforms Blogspot, LiveJournal Yahoo! answers, Epinions Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Reddit Twitter, foursquare Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Tribe
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Source: adapted from Tang and Liu (2010, p. 1).
popular platforms, circa 2010. The ever-changing universe of media include blogs, microblogs, discussion forums, media sharing sites, and social networks (Table 1). In the years ahead, we may expect to learn more about how design features of particular social media (for example, Twitters 140-character limit per message) encourage (or alternatively discourage) particular kinds of speech, and foster open and inclusive (or alternatively, closed and restrictive) discourse, among other concerns. The objective of the present article is to develop a broad Lasswellian map of social media in public affairs into which these more specic research questions may be embedded. Although social media and social network are used interchangeably in this article, the analysis here should not be confused with social network analysis, whose prominent exponents, like Wasserman and Faust (1994), develop models of relationships among networks of individuals or collections of individuals. Wasserman and Fausts insights may prove helpful in characterizing the structure of networks of users of social media and pathways of information ow (see, for example, Tang & Liu [2010], p. 34). A physical portrayal of social networks is of less interest in the present analysis than is the exploration of the value dispositions, identities, and strategies of actors who generate and use social media content for political and policy purposes. Not just any web site or mobile phone application is a platform for social media. As the moniker, followers suggests (Twitter, in this case) there is a notion of community among users of social media. A reader of an article at CNN.com is not necessarily part of a network involving other CNN web site visitors; if that same reader posts a comment about the article on CNNs blog (or on another blog or on the microblogging platform Twitter), he or she has entered an electronic community where user opinions and values are shared. Indeed, values and opinions are shaped and shared (per Lasswell) because digital posts spawn commentary, sway views, and spur action. Consider, for example, that in the 2008 American presidential election, the Pew Research Centers Internet & American Life Project found that around 20 percent of Internet users posted their thoughts, comments, or questions about the campaign on a web site, blog, social networking site, or other online forum (Smith, 2009). In that same election, 14 percent of Internet users and 11 percent of all adults forwarded or posted someone elses political commentary or writing (Rainie & Smith, 2008). Young people appear to be relatively more likely to use social media to relay personal views or experiences about politics and voting. Almost 50 percent of social network users between the ages of 18 and 29 polled by Pew declared they had used social media to discover
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their friends political interests or afliations, to receive campaign information, to sign up as a friend of a candidate, or to join or start a political group. Thirty-two percent of those surveyed in the 30+ age group indicated they used social media for one or more of these purposes (Rainie & Smith, 2008). There are also indications of increasingly important policy functions performed by social media. Some illustrations point to social medias role in doing nothing less than saving peoples lives. Jeff Pulver, an organizer of an annual conference on Twitter, declares that, during the Haiti earthquake crisis of 2010, he was able to re-tweet a message posted by a journalist about a humanitarian relief ight held up in the skies over Port-au-Prince. The U.S. Air Force, in command of the capitals airport, had not cleared the plane to land. Shortly after Pulvers forwarded tweet, the Air Force tweeted back, Were on it (della Cava, 2010). In that same crisis, the Text Haiti 90999 program, conveyed on mobile phones, was a joint initiative of the communications company Mobile Accord, the U.S. Department of State and the Red Cross. As of June 2010, the project raised more than $41 million for earthquake relief (Mobile Accord, 2010). In another case, friends, family, and sympathetic Twitter followers of an Omani reporter aboard the Freedom Flotilla, a vessel that clashed with Israeli Defense Forces in the Mediterranean in 2010, got updates about the reporters situation via his tweets and Facebook updates (Johnson, 2010). Twitter has also relayed information from democracy advocates to the world and helped demonstrators coordinate their actions during the so-called Twitter Revolution in Moldova in 2009 (Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, 2009; but see Applebaum, 2009). More dramatic still were video uploads, tweets, and Facebook updates from the streets of Tehran as thousands of demonstrators protested disputed presidential elections in 2009. Galvanizing information on social networks included a viral video of the shooting death of an Iranian woman, viewed by millions around the globe. It is common knowledge that Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, and other electronic networking tools featured prominently in uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa in 2010 and 2011.
Social Media and Lasswells Science of Communications If adulthood for social media platforms is reached once these technologies begin impacting politics and public policy, then tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are growing up fast. None of these portals were specically designed for collecting or disseminating information on politics or public affairs. But much as the Internets present-day functions go well beyond the purposes it was originally designed for (see Abbate, 2000), social mediaeven Twitters deliberately cramped messaging platformare increasingly important in what Harold D. Lasswell described as the communication process of human society (Lasswell, 1948). Evidence of this trend, for example, are the half-million followers of tweets transmitted by two, young State Department ofcials, one of whom goes by the title, Senior Adviser for Innovation (Lichtenstein, 2010, p. 26). The New York Times reports the pairs tweets, have
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become an integral part of a new State Department effort to bring diplomacy into the digital age, by using widely available technologies to reach out to citizens, companies, and other nonstate actors (Lichtenstein, 2010, p. 26). On the surface, these new, open communication channelsaccessible by virtually anyone with an iPhone, smartphone, or dial-up or high-speed modemwould appear to pose a challenge to Lasswells framing of who participates in ofcial and journalistic communication streams. In Lasswells schema, the generators and transmitters of domestic and foreign news and of ofcial policy communications were comparatively few and were professionals versus the seemingly wide-open eld of potential content uploaders to social networks. However, although Lasswell made a careful taxonomy of: Who Says What In Which Channel To Whom With What Effect? (Lasswell, 1948, p. 37), he also insisted, We are less interested in dividing up the act of communication than in viewing the act as a whole in relation to the entire social process (Lasswell, 1948, p. 38). Following this advice requires attention to the plausible outcomes and effects of social media in the public arena; and it demands a careful rendering of what, exactly, is revolutionary in the social media revolution.1 In the paragraphs that follow, we examine social media and digital public discourse through a Lasswellian lens. Both the social process and decision process are our templates, beginning with the social process. Social Media and the Power Value Returning to the tale of the young State Department ofcials and the task of bringing diplomacy into the digital age: the New York Times reports: Even last year (2009) . . . the State Department was boxed into the world of communiqus, diplomatic cables and slow government-to-government negotiations (Lichtenstein, 2010, p. 26). To open up and make more participatory the creation and exchange of communications, new applications were adopted, including the short-messageservice (S.M.S.). Among other things, this tool could be used by volunteers to monitor election results in developing countries (even very poor countries have mobile telephony infrastructure that can support S.M.S.). How might Lasswells science of communications make sense of the range of new actors who participate in social-mediated diplomatic processesthat is, processes mediated by Twitter and other S.M.S.? Lasswells concept of ofcial communication in the world community, consists of three categories of specialists: One group surveys the political environment of the state as a whole, another correlates the response of the whole state to the environment, and the third transmits certain patterns of response from the old to the young. Diplomats,
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attachs, and foreign correspondents are representatives of those who specialize on the environment. Editors, journalists, and speakers are correlators of the internal response. Educators in family and school transmit the social inheritance. (Lasswell, 1948, p. 40) Editors and journalists occupy the middle group in Lasswells communication stream. But is it the case that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and various i-reporter sites serve to reduce the signicance of the these middlemen, or as Lasswell referred to them, the message controllers? An i-reporter can post messages to blogs, Facebook, and other social media platforms without interference from editors or censors. The same State Department ofcials who tweet may have their message modied by followers who send their own, modied version of the State Department tweet to family and friends. And while Lasswell speaks of educators transmitting lessons in family and school, social media nd young people inuencing the old (Slaughter, 2009). Any misgivings about the continuing relevance of Lasswells labels for participants in communication processes are effectively nullied when one considers his and Myres McDougals distinction between conventional and functional analyses. When we examine institutions, the functional picture, Lasswell and McDougal (1992, p. 389) note, will often be at variance with conventional images, and so, for example, businesspersons may be associated not only with wealth, but also with skill and enlightenment. Governmental actors not only exercise power; they can generate wealth, dispense respect, and so on. For policy purposes, what counts is not whether Lasswells editors, censors, and other communicators remain relevant as conventional occupational categories. The obsolescence of particular jobs is irrelevant if, in fact, the functions performed by these jobs continue to be executed by other actors or institutions. What matters is how systems of communication, and the actors who participate in them, operate in functional terms and to what effect. As to the matter of young peoples ascendance via their use of social media: Lasswell recognized the synergistic possibilities of youth and the communication revolution in an essay on the prospects of a global common identity. People sharing the common identity will take one another into consideration in their decisions and choices (Lasswell, 1972, p. 8). This broadening and intensifying identity, he observed: will undoubtedly be affected by the attitudes of the young and the expectations of the old about the orientation of the young. . . . The youth appear to have the potential for collective action on the massive scale necessary to break down many surviving perspectives and operating arrangements . . . (Lasswell, 1972, p. 23) These operating arrangements included the institution of war. Lasswells essay was penned when young people were demonstrating for peace and questioning authority. Today, a new generation of young people is entering into positions of power and using social media for instrumental purposes related to power. Now and
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in the years ahead, policy scientists might explore how a younger, socially networked generation justies its accumulation and application of power, including coercive power. Whether policymakers who use social media are young or old, decisions they make about the uses of social media have consequences for power, wealth, respect, and other value outcomes. Critics of the State Departments use of Twitter and Facebook note that the government is at risk of choosing which vendors win or lose in the competition to disseminate policy-relevant information. More ominously, it has been suggested that enemies of the state might recognize particular vendors as being part of the state, putting the vendors and their users at grave risk (Lichtenstein, 2010, pp. 2628). Consider, for example, the State Departments pressure on the founder and CEO of Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance of the platform so as not to interfere with Iranian demonstrators and opposition leaders use of the tool during the 2009 postelection protests (Lichtenstein, 2010, p. 27). Notwithstanding the hype about the openness and accessibility of social media and the disempowerment of message controllers (like newspaper editors), modern-day controllers, including inventors of social media, executives who purchase and brand these inventions, and charismatic personalities with many followers, are very much part of the crafting and dissemination of inuential pronouncements and of news advocacy. Social Process Sketch of Social Media in the Service of Diplomacy Competition among users of social media to convey inuential messages and the varying motivations of these users are ideal substrates to be explored by Lasswells social process. The social process is a comprehensive map of both basic, overarching, authoritative structures and rules, and the particular decisions that emerge from this architecture (Lasswell & McDougal, 1992, pp. 2629). The social process is part of a larger framework that policy scientists use to identify participants who interact in particular situations and who use strategies to obtain desired outcomes. Table 2 summarizes fundamental categories of the social process, denes key terms, and offers illustrations relevant to the present inquiry. In introducing theoretical construct(s) and practical uses of the social process, Lasswell and McDougal write that their own tabular itemization of this concept make(s) no pretense of either comprehensiveness or homogeneity. . . . (1992, p. 99). The same proviso applies to the denitions and illustrations shown in Table 2. Readers are directed to Lasswell and McDougal (1992) for an elaborate treatment of the social process. In the passages that follow, we consider, in summary form, the social process of social media in the public policy realm, with attention to the arena of U.S. digital diplomacy. Major concepts and categories from the social process are denoted by words with capitalized rst letters. A key, comparatively well-organized Participant, the state, makes use of a communication platform that millions of followers consult. The followers are organized only to the extent they follow the same Tweeter, and in this respect, they share a common Identity. The Identities and Perspectives of the Tweeters are core concerns
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Policy Studies Journal, 39:4 Table 2. The Social Process and Social Media in Public Affairs
Category Participants
Denition Key actors in public affairs, including organized and unorganized actors; individuals and groups; systems of representation or nonrepresentation
Illustrated in the Social Media of Public Affairs
Partisan bloggers; Tweeters of eyewitness news at political rallies; followers (of these Tweeters); Facebook page creators focusing on politics and Facebook friends; peer-to-peer sharers of political video Perspectives Identities of participants, their Advocates for democracy in politically demands, expectations, and operating repressive countries; loyalists of repressive myths regimes; operating myth that the Internet is the worlds town square (see BBC News, 2011) Arenas Spatial, temporal, and institutional Universality and global reach of social media settings where participants interact platforms; diminished importance of geography, distance, and time through mastery of social media Base values Assets at ones disposal to secure Self-importance (respect) by being LinkedIn to preferred outcomes; Lasswells classic an elite; enlightenment and rectitude after eight values: power, enlightenment, viewing an online video of a political wealth, well-being, skill, affection, demonstration respect, and rectitude Strategies Plans, plots, and tools for achieving Using computer hacking skills to fortify the goals and objectives power of an autocrat; tweeting locations of political rallies Outcomes Culminating events in particular Well-attended rallies, enabled by Twitter, spur contexts a regime crackdown; well-attended rallies, enabled by Twitter, hasten a regimes collapse Effects Post-outcome consequences and Crackdown on social media inspires new long-term changes to institutions resistance strategies by prodemocracy advocates; crackdown inadvertently harms economic actors who depend on social media; bloggers who pressure regime to quit are empowered and earn respect but also confront challenges of postregime nation building
Sources: Based on Clark (2002); Lasswell (1971a); Lasswell & McDougal (1992).
here. In the age of social media, professional identities are blurred in the communications sent on social networks. Communications are also shaped by users who modify and pass along reconstituted messages; these users have their own particular Expectations and Demands. As the New York Times notes: Where once there was a pretty bright line between journalist and political operative, there is now a kind of a continuum, with politicians becoming media providers in their own right, and pundits, entertainers and journalists often driving political discussions. (Carr, 2010) Whether the public recognizes its favorite Tweeter and Facebook personalities as politicians, public administrators, pundits, entertainers, or some combination thereof, the devotees are tuning-in, sometimes with great frequency. Users obtain information about public issues that are important to them, including about the
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conduct of ofcial U.S. actors abroad, and followers and friends voice their own demands. These expressed demands are followed by others. Tweeters endeavor to understand the proclivities of their followers; the two State Department ofcials frequently blend ofcial business with references to popular culturefor example, discussing a high-level meeting on the challenges of containing an unfriendly regime in Iran, combined with tasting notes on a coffee the Tweeter consumed during that meeting (Lichtenstein, 2010, p. 26). Here is Lasswells triple appeal principle at work, whereby the messenger simultaneously appeals to the viewer or listeners rational, moral, and impulsive divisions of personality (Lasswell, 1932). The Situation or Arena where these messages are conveyed are mediated by sophisticated communication technologies designed for busy people who view content and, almost as quickly, react. Some of the followers re-tweet the original message or modify it. A communicative Strategy is in play: Tweeters and re-Tweeters seek to inform, and perhaps, misinformboundaries that Lasswell and McDougal explore when referring to permissible and impermissible communication and propaganda (1992, pp. 120002). Outcomes, which are endpoints in any specic policy context, include indulging users of social media who feel empowered and enlightened as never before. Effects, which are long-term or second-order consequences, include changes in institutional resources and value outcomes, including, for example, a 2010 State Department decision to cut nancing to Iranian dissident groups living abroad offset by that agencys stepped-up investments in social networks for dissidents inside Iran (Lichtenstein, 2010, p. 27). This brief sketch of the social process of social media in public affairsand more specically, of the social network-mediated policy work of the U.S. Department of Stateunderscores what is at stake for that agency and for its customers, including Americans and non-Americans alike. Among other outputs, the social process map produced by the policy analyst inspires him or her to think carefully about how policies, strategies, and decisions affect value outcomes, measured as accumulations, or alternatively, deprivations of power, of enlightenment, of wealth, and so on. In choosing to move policy and communication resources into social media, the State Departments decision inevitably rewarded some stakeholders while reducing assistance to others, including actors who were deeply invested in the established ways of doing business, pre-Twitter. Inside the larger social process of American diplomacy are the specic policy decisions to use social media and the consequences of these decisions. These topics are fodder for Lasswells decision process that contains seven functional categories (intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination, and appraisal). The decision process is an elaboration of outcomes in the social processand in particular, the outcomes of actors striving to accrete and use power (and by extension, to accumulate and use all value assets) (Lasswell, 1971a, pp. 2728). Denitions and generic examples of these seven decision functions in social media and politics are presented in Table 3. The lasting impact of Lasswells decision process is apparent in myriad redactions and reformulations, and in some cases, misreadings (see, e.g., Sabatier, 1999).2 The decision process is constructive for uncovering malfunctions in policymaking
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Policy Studies Journal, 39:4 Table 3. The Decision Process and Social Media in Public Affairs
Category Intelligence
Denition The gathering, processing, and dissemination of information relevant to a policy decision
Illustrated in the Social Media of Public Affairs Content found on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other microblogging, social networking, and media sharing sites dedicated to politics and policy, maintained by state or nonstate actors Blogs, microblogs, forums espousing political views or proposing policy alternatives Media sharing platforms carrying ofcial pronouncements of public leaders; forums with compendia of rules and regulations; blogs dominated by consistent viewpoints that stabilize readers/viewers expectations about particular community norms Spontaneous, microblogged comments about an alleged transgression by a political elite; electronic version of an arrest warrant redacted on a media sharing site A resignation speech by a disgraced politician, uploaded to a media sharing site; a court ruling summarized in 140 characters Rapidly tweeted news of the lifting of martial law; deleting a hyperlink to a state-sponsored Facebook page dealing with employment insurance after insurance program is suspended Using a tag cloud to organize and analyze comments by voters leaving the polls; tracking tweets about a presidential decision to use force
Promotion Prescription
The advocacy of policy alternatives Norms that reect public perspectives about who makes and enforces decisions, by what criteria, and by what procedure
Invoking
The provisional characterization of particular acts that are/are not in conformity with a prescription The nal characterization of particular acts that are/are not in conformity with a prescription The abrogation of a prescription and its implementation apparatus
Application
Termination
Appraisal
The evaluation of decisions
Sources: Based on Lasswell (1971a); Lasswell & McDougal (1992).
and there are many such explorations (see, e.g., Mattson & Chambers, 2009; Clark, Willard, & Cromley, 2000; Auer, 1998). However, this same tool allows students to ask so what questions, such as: Are social media consequential in political and policymaking arenas? Mainstream media outlets are beginning to grapple with these concerns, too (see, e.g., Applebaum, 2009; Keller, 2010). In the next section, we consider social media as purposeful in making decisions affecting the community, i.e., public policy decisions. We also use a social media tool to test its value in policy appraisalnamely, a tag cloud or word cloud, which is a weighted list of words or terms that, in principle, can provide order to the contents of disparate e-communications. Peer-to-Peer Citizenry and the Decision Process Possible outcomes from uses of social media in public affairs range from the widely praised, e.g., a Text Haiti humanitarian relief campaign, to inconsequential, e.g., posts on a political blog that no one consults, to the potentially destructive, e.g., tweeted bomb-making tips. To be systematic in appraising policy-relevant decisions
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involving social networks, all parts of Lasswells seven-component decision process should be deployed. A comprehensive application of the decision process that covers the full range of interactions among social media, politics, and policy is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, we consider the decision process as a heuristic for classifying social medias functions in policy arenas, generally. Readers are directed to Lasswell (1956a) for a concise introduction to the decision process. The intelligence, promotion, and appraisal categories of the decision process are examined as a suite because of the seven functions; they are the most open and accessible to users of social media. Virtually anyone with policy analytical training and who owns a smartphone or has access to a web browser can collect and study information on digital platforms, post opinions on blogs, and, at least provisionally, evaluate policies. In contrast, prescription, invocation, application, and termination in ofcial policymaking arenas are specialized functions dominated by (though not exclusively populated by) ofcial actors.3 The roles and impacts of social media in these two suites of functions are considered below. Intelligence, Promotion, Appraisal, and Social Media. The impacts of social networks in public affairs are perhaps most obvious in the execution of the intelligence and promotion functions. Lasswell dened intelligence as the gathering, processing, and dissemination of information for the use of all who participate in the decision process (Lasswell, 1971a, pp. 2829). Criteria he presented for the effective application of intelligence and the other functions were not to be used in pedantic fashion but instead to draw a working sketch of the possibilities (Lasswell, 1971a, p. 85). These criteria are suitable for testing the adequacy of social media for intelligence purposes. Consider the criterion of dependability. By dependable, Lasswell meant credible. Tests of credibility include whether purported statements of fact are representative of the best available, whether qualied experts can vouch for the facts, and whether rst-person observation is involved (Lasswell, 1971a, p. 85). One may conjecture that the reliability of e-communications, weighed against these demands, often fall short. At a minimum, fact-checking and accuracy are not inherent expectations of social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook.4 To date, there is little available scholarship either supporting or challenging conjectures about the dependability of social media for policy-oriented intelligence purposes. While the accuracy of information on the Internet has received attention (e.g., Kunst, Groot, Latthe, Latthe, & Khan, 2002; Sunstein, 2006; Economist, 2010), social networking tools like Facebook, Tribe, Myspace, and Twitter have not been subject to comparable tests. Privacy concerns about social media more so than information accuracy have generated negative press.5 However, considering the seamless integration of Facebook and Twitter icons on news sites and on the homepages of policy think tanks (see, e.g., http://www.aspeninstitute.org/; http:// www.cfr.org/), international organizations (see, e.g., http://www.fao.org), and the fact that the very rst word (and link) on the U.S. Department of State web site is blog (http://www.state.gov/ retrieved April 11, 2011), it would seem incumbent on policy scientists to pose Lasswells dependability criterion with rigor. Inuential social media sites that spin news for both promotional and entertainment
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purposes might draw particular interest considering that, for example, in the fall of 2011, Comedy Central personality Stephen Colbert ranked ninety-fourth among Twitter accounts with the largest number of followers, with more than 2.1 million (Twitaholic, 2011).6 According to a Rasmussen poll, almost 21 percent of respondents said that the Comedy Central shows The Colbert Report and The Daily Show were at least somewhat inuential in shaping their political opinions, and one in three respondents believe that these shows were taking the place of traditional news outlets (Rasmussen Reports, 2009). Twitter followers of conservative cable show host Glenn Beck (whose programs tagline is the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment) number in the hundreds of thousands. Cable television, but also social media have given platforms to political agitators who, in prior years, would have been pushed to the margins in the dominant two-party political system. In his Politics at the Periphery, G. David Gillespie redacts a conservative journalists condemnations of mainstream media during the 1992 presidential campaign: The media regard the two-party system as sacred, though the Constitution says nothing about it. (Libertarian presidential candidate) Marrou wants to restore our freedom. This is why he will be consigned to the oblivion of a minor candidate (Gillespie, 1993, p. 178). However, by the midterm elections of 2010, political voices insisting on a return to the Constitution were the battle cry of an insurgent Tea Party movement whose leaders relied more often on social media to organize angry constituents than on coverage by mainstream media (Daniels, 2010). Politically motivated users of social media may appraise the dependability of social media content using a decidedly different metric than that used by policy scientists, namely, is the information dependable in the ideological sense (i.e., is it ideologically pure and consistent with the participants dominant belief system)? For ideologues, credibleness might be determined by gut-level sensibilities and appeals to impulse rather than fact-based persuasion and appeals to reason. Apart from dependability, Lasswells criteria for judging intelligence include comprehensiveness, selectivity, creativity, and openness (Lasswell, 1971a, pp. 8788). As with dependability, social media are challenged by the comprehensiveness and selectivity tests. By denition, tweets, even compiled tweets on a matter of vital public import, are unlikely to meet the policy scientists demands for comprehensiveness, including detailed sketches of Lasswells all-inclusive ve intellectual tasks: goals, trends, conditions, projections, and alternatives. Meanwhile, social media are open communication channels; they are not selective, by design. Twitter, Facebook, and many other social networking tools are replete with, by any measure, content that is not of vital concern to the community. It is creativity and openness where social medias strengths are most apparent, including in policy arenas. Wikipedias (2010a) list of social networking sites contains more than 200 platforms varying in purpose, but, in aggregate, offering a wide array of creative opportunities for uploaders and users of content. Certainly, social media invite new objectives and strategies (per Lasswells creativity criterion) for addressing any number of public concerns through the various forums found on these sites. (Whether intelligence and promotion shared on these platforms are realistic [per Lasswell] is another matter.) Finally, many social networks
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measure up to Lasswells openness criterion. This standard calls for eliciting cooperation in obtaining intelligence. The ever-present i-reporter buttons, blogs, and comment elds on news web sites are indicative of the potential advantages these portals offer to publicly minded citizens and lay reporters compared with traditional news gathering and ofcial intelligence institutions. However, it is the very openness of these tools that create the dependability and selectivity problems described above, and no less urgent, a blurring of intelligence and promotion outcomes. Promotional copy on social networks is great in volume, and the type of promotion occupies a continuum from the overt, including ordinary advertising, to the surreptitious, including seemingly raw and unadulterated information leaked (or stolen) from the hard drives of the ruling few. To illustrate the latter, consider a powerful, graphic video transmitted by WikiLeaks in 2010 of a 2007 U.S. military action against suspected Iraqi insurgents (who, apparently unbeknownst to U.S. forces, included Iraqi journalists). WikiLeaks used Twitter to seek help in decrypting this video (Cohen & Stelter, 2010). Collateral Murder, the title of an edited version of the WikiLeaks video, creates another challenge for the viewer. Its full context is not revealeda return to the comprehensiveness problem discussed above. The viewer does not know what decisions preceded the order to engage the suspected militants and the rules of engagement are not explained. WikiLeaks calls itself the rst intelligence agency of the people (WikiLeaks, 2010). Here are advocates who, in their words, collect and dispense intelligencea test of the boundaries between the intelligence and promotion functions, fostered by new, electronic media. Other values at stake include well-being and rectitude: in 2010, in another WikiLeaks case, the organization posted approximately 92,000 secret and classied materials dealing with U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. In some of the documents were names of Afghan informants who, conceivably, could become targets of reprisal (Schmitt & Savage, 2010).7 Because uploaded material is disparate (in its origins and dependability) and unltered, there are likely to be mixed promotional outcomes when another of Lasswells criteria is considered: integrativeness. Integrative approaches, Lasswell argues, forge broad understandings among competing interests about particular problems or solutions (Lasswell, 1971a, pp. 8889). In promotional processes, social media could serve to coalesce interests, strengthen voices that otherwise might be diffuse or poorly organized, and create a sense of dramatic tensionconsider, for example, the augmenting effects of Twitter and Facebook in the disputed presidential elections in Iran and in Moldova in 2009 and in popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa in 2010 and 2011. However, Lasswell warns that integrativeness can lead to overintensity; promotional activities can become so feverish, they provoke coercive responseseither by the aggrieved or by powerful actors who feel threatened (Lasswell, 1971a, p. 89).8 Social media can create lack of integration in political and policy arenas in unexpected ways. WikiLeaks posted thousands of classied diplomatic cables in the fall of 2010. The Obama administration and various mainstream public media outlets wondered aloud whether particular policy efforts might be jeopardized, including U.S. counterterrorism operations (CBS News, 2010). However, in the short term, the most damaging effects of the leaked cables
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involved not so much risks to national security (power deprivation) as personal embarrassment and loss of face, following the revelations of political leaders unattering assessments of one another (respect deprivation). Lasswell notes that integrative solutions nd parties coalescing sooner rather than later in the promotion process; for diplomats, this may be hard to achieve when, as the New Yorker coined it, ostensible allies become frenemies in the WikiLeaks era (Widicombe, 2010). WikiLeaks posts have generated much discussion on blogs, tweets, updates on Facebook, and comments on YouTube about the roles and responsibilities of social media and the Internet. In these particular cases, do the commentators reections form a kind of policy appraisalone of Lasswells seven decision functions? As with the intelligence function, the individual and aggregate online reactions of users are of limited value for policy appraisal. The qualities of viewer posts about Collateral Murder, for example, are distinctive for their immediacy, not for their lasting impact nor dependability. They are impressionistic, not authoritative. Also, because of their instantaneousness, many e-communications on matters of public import are more likely to tap impulses than reason.9 In the WikiLeaks cases, and others, users may be providing material for pre-appraisal; however, compilations or summations of reactions and reections should not be confused with the disciplined work of systematic appraisal. Exceptions may include instances when comments and posts have embedded links to conventional evaluations and assessments. To illustrate, a link in a tweet to a Government Accountability Ofce report might improve the dependability and/or selectivity of the content of that tweet. However, the limits of social media for policy appraisal are very apparent if the principal measure of quality is whether and to what extent social networks make reference to traditional or ofcial forms of appraisal. The question is whether there are inherent features and attributes of social networks that make them indispensable for appraisal. Prescription, Invocation, Application, Termination, and Social Media. Is it possible for social media to participate in the ofcial promulgation of community norms? To date, examples of ofcial policy prescription on social networks are rare, as are examples of invocation and application. Nevertheless, considering the expanding functions of social media, it is reasonable to project roles they could play in prescription and enforcement. To do so, it is necessary to separate real possibilities from exaggerated promises. Excitement about the possibility of the Internet playing a major role in, for example, public elections and referenda has given way to concerns about voter fraud and correct recording of votes (Nevo & Kim, 2006). For users, there are also risks of being seduced by the power and sophistication of the technologies themselves, leading to confusion about the functions these platforms perform in policy processes. We consider this latter problem rst with attention to the prescription function. For social networks, prescriptive roles could be performed in ofcial arenas, such as in Congress, as well as in nonauthoritative situations where, nevertheless, participants expectations about rules, procedures, and practices are stabilized and common interests are advanced (Lasswell, 1971a, pp. 9091). If lawmakers or their staff members exchange marked-up drafts of legislative bills on open or even
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password-protected social networks, these activities most closely t a Lasswellian conception of prescription. However, in reaching wider audiences who are the natural constituencies of most social networks like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, lawmakers are more likely to use these technologies for decision functions other than prescription. Sourcewatch (2010) listed 19 senators and 51 house members as authors of newsworthy tweets in 2010. If the primary audience of the lawmakers tweets are constituents and organized interests, more often than not, the tweets are for promotional and, conceivably, intelligence purposes. If the lawmaker uses social media to search for and identify archival material (consider video uploaded on YouTube) or other information for the purpose of drafting legislation, then an intelligence function is performed by these technologies. In these instances, we circle back to concerns about the quality and validity of content on various electronic media. If Twitters comparative advantage is to document people emoting and if blogs indiscriminately blend veriable facts with conjecture (that sometimes pass for fact), is society advantaged by a lawmaker who relies on these tools to draft bills or by public agencies that use them for writing regulations?10 Consider the prospects of using Flickr, the photo- and video-sharing web site, for invocation. When a county sheriff posts images of cars speeding through a particular stop sign at a particular intersection, perhaps the purpose is promotional (letting citizens know, were watching you). However, for any given law offender caught on camera, an image uploaded on Flickr forms evidence of a specic, concrete transgression. The latter is invocation. In contrast, if the many public regulatory and natural resource management agencies that monitored British Petroleum (BP)s remotely operated video of the Deepwater Horizon spill (BP, 2010) also used these images to coordinate their own roles in responding to the crisis, then the technology (in this case, the Internet) is involved directly in intelligence and indirectly in invocation and application functions. The Haiti earthquake illustration is relevant here as well. After the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001 . . . New York City rst responders spent millions to synchronize their communications systems. But during Haitis disaster, everyone was tuned to the same channel, and it was called Twitter, declares Twitter enthusiast Jeff Pulver (della Cava, 2010). If true, then Twitter could serve meaningful invocation and application functions. These illustrations indicate a trend. Much as platforms like Twitter and Facebook are especially adept at documenting and disseminating peoples immediate impressions, conceivably these same technologies are most salient for invocation during times of crisis when response times are short. The challenge for the invoker, then, is sorting critical information from junk on social networks. Despite Pulvers enthusiastic praise for Twitters role in coordinating help for post-earthquake Haiti, it is not clear whether and to what extent rst responders and other key actors were able to efciently lter out low quality information. Skimming the contents of hundreds of tweets is probably not adequate to the task at hand. It is still the case that Lasswells middlemanthe controllerin the communication process is needed, or at any rate, is longed for by users of these technologies, particularly in moments of
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great import to the community. A later section in this article considers whether innovations in digital communication, including web-based applications like Wordle and TagCrowd, might provide this key ltering function. First, however, we consider whether social media might mediate the termination function in policy decisions. As is true of prescription, invocation, and application, what may appear to be social medias roles in termination are more often about the collection, processing, diffusion, and promotion of e-communications. Consider an example of termination in a case involving an unofcial prescription, namely a decision to end a popular public affairs program on cable television. In 2004, Jon Stewart appeared on Crossre, a current events program on CNN featuring hosts with dueling political ideologies. His indictment of the show, during his interview, indirectly led to the shows cancellation.11 A Wikipedia entry on this episode reads, Following his appearance, transcripts and live stream footage were released on the Internet and widely watched and discussed. The episode itself had 867,000 viewers (the average number of viewers Crossre had per episode in the previous month was about 615,000). As of April 12, 2008, the 13 minute 30 second clip had over 3,960,873 views on iFilm, making it the third most popular video of all time on that web site. (Wikipedia, 2010b) Condemnations of Crossre by Stewart fans who watched the original airing of the episode were probably too few in number to cause the shows cancellation. It was the viral viewings on other web sites and social network-mediated word-of-mouth about Stewarts denunciations that imperiled the programs future. In this case, as in the other illustrations above, the power of social media and the Internet has more to do with intelligence and promotion than with termination, at least directly. Here, information and opinion, powerfully channeled, and quickly diffused, led to a consequential decision about a long-running cable show. Termination by e-referendum is already a possibility since referenda are present on electronic platforms in some communities. There are also ways that electronic media can directly and decisively end the programmatic extensions of public policy. Consider the nal step in the process of terminating e-government services; the end is as simple as taking a relevant URL ofine or removing a button or tag from a web site. Termination, Lasswell notes, deals with the claims put forward by those who acted in good faith when the prescriptions were in effect, and who stand to suffer value deprivation when they are ended, and moreover, In societies where innovation is rapid, new structures are often needed to cope with claims of the expropriated . . . (Lasswell, 1971a, p. 29). Rapid innovation can create special challenges for decision makers who control the termination function. Social media present potentially efcient ways to invoke and apply prescriptions, as large numbers of users tap into the same network. Imagine, for example, Facebook-like networks with embedded accounts for tracking Social Security benets. However, if and when the prescription is cancelled, these beneciaries, all linked together in a single network, become a potentially powerful, aggrieved voice.12
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Navigating the e-Communications Rapids: An Appraisal In preceding sections, and using Lasswells criteria for intelligence, we considered the trade-offs for the reader and viewer of user-generated electronic media made available without the journalistic demands for fact-checking, corroboration, and editing. Every uploader of content is his or her own master, and every consumer of that content experiences the privileges and pitfalls of access to immediate and raw commentary, imagery, and would-be news in the potential absence of community standards for dependability, comprehensiveness, and selectivity. Another downside is the sheer volume of copy and the navigation of effervescent content. Rapidly developing stories carried on e-news siteskey sources for users of social mediaamount to ever-changing drafts. New drafts may contain more dependable copy but may not include acknowledgments of errors or errata issued in conventional print editions. Inaccuracies are demoted to rumors or disappear altogether in the nextor even the samenews cycle. USA Today observes that a disadvantage of Twitter is . . . TMI: too much information, and an inability to accurately decipher its meaning (della Cava, 2010). Indeed, information is a presumptuous catchall for the disparate content and uncertain value of tweets and other social media content. One social networking expert observes that tweets involve a lot of joking and goong and just plain mistakes . . . (della Cava, 2010). This is not informing (particularly if there are mistakes of fact) nor is it necessarily a basis for promoting knowledge or understanding. The dilemma may be more accurately described as TMEtoo much e-communication rather than too much information. Blogs and i-reports are not accompanied by the equivalent of nutritional labels nor, in some cases, are user instructions provided. The same is true of newspapers and network news. However, the major broadsheets earn distinction for dependability, comprehensiveness, and selectivity based on reputation, secured over time, and by the cumulative impressions of readers. Perhaps comparable reputational or (respect) accumulations or losses will emerge for the many social media platforms, helping to clarify user expectations about where to turn for information, thoughtful opinion, or unltered e-communication. In the meantime, readers and viewers are challenged by the TME problem. Lending order and making sense of the glut of messages, images, and video would appear to be increasingly urgent tasks particularly if social networks become default vehicles for shaping and sharing policy intelligence and promotion in an open, public, decision process.13 Tag clouds are, in principle, a tool to lend order to e-communications. According to Rivadeneira, Gruen, Muller, and Millen (2007): Tagclouds are visual presentations of a set of words, typically a set of tags selected by some rationale, in which attributes of the text such as size, weight, or color are used to represent features, such as frequency, of the associated terms. (Rivadeneira et al., 2007; see also, Sinclair, 2008)
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Frequency of words in a given communication, with recurrent terms made more prominent by a large font size, prominent font style, or color, is the most common application of a tag cloud. The purpose is to distinguish or otherwise rank words in, for example, blogs, speeches, or articles. Tag clouds have become a preferred interactive tool for some social media sites (Strohmaier, 2010). Tag clouds would appear to provide a kind of rapid appraisal tool for the policy analyst endeavoring to make sense of a dynamic, high-volume stream of communication. Tag cloud technology tends to be easy to use, requiring little more than copying and pasting text into a text eld, clicking go, and waiting a few moments for the results. Interfaces for tag clouds are found on multiple web sites. Consider an application to a case with the fast-moving, surge-of-interest qualities mentioned above. On Tuesday, June 22, 2010, General Stanley A. McChrystal, President Obamas top military ofcer in Afghanistan, paid an urgent visit to the White House. Hours earlier, the presidents aides learned of disparaging remarks made by the general and the generals staff about Mr. Obama and other top ofcials. Those remarks were to be published in a popular magazine the following day. According to the New York Times, as of the morning of the meeting, the president had not made up his mind about the generals fate (Cooper, Shanker, & Filkins, 2010). A policy analyst following this story might endeavor to make a tag cloud of available blogs, Twitter feeds, or news articles so as to measure the national mood, or at any rate, to learn more about the impressions of direct participants in the case, of pundits, or of ordinary citizens. Social media educator and blogger Rodd Lucier recommends using Wordle, a tag cloud generator, to examine combine(d) news articles and to make compelling summaries of political speeches, articles, and other texts (Lucier, 2008). Wordles interface made the following tag cloud from the combined text of the Wall Street Journals 1,119-word, Decision to Dismiss McChrystal Came Swiftly (Weisman, 2010) and the New York Times 1,594-word, McChrystals Fate in Limbo as He Prepares to Meet Obama (Cooper et al., 2010) (Figure 1). The Wordle interface randomly selects layout, font, and font color; the results are generated within seconds. In this case, the layout style was Any Which Way (selected randomly by the interface) in black and white Coolvetica font. Plainly, this output tantalizes the eye but at the expense of order and clarity. Wordle affords the user some control over the presentation of data. For example, one may select for alphabetic ordering and horizontal layout. These preferences, combined with a calmer font (Gnuolane Free) produce Figure 2. Even with these improvements, the incremental advantages for the intelligence or appraisal functions are limited. The shortcomings have little to do with graphics or the user interface. The problems are analytical rather than aesthetic or technical. The context is virtually indecipherable: an observer unfamiliar with the case might surmise that General McChrystal and President Obama had a meeting, but even that conjecture is uncertain. Additional tests of the interface, for example, to explore whether the Wall Street Journals editorials on the sacking of General McChrystal contain comparatively prominent (and hence more frequent) adjectives or nouns critical of the Obama administrationa reasonable expectation considering
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Figure 1. Tag Cloud of the General McChrystal Case.
Figure 2. Second Tag Cloud of the General McChrystal Case.
the ideological leanings of that publications editorial staffprove unrevealing when laid side by side with Wordle images of New York Times editorials on the same subject. Policy scientists have substantial doubts about reductionist methods in policy analysis (Ascher, 1987; Brunner, 1991). However, in the case of tag clouds, the problem may be more severe still as information is not merely reduced, it is disintegrated. Conditioning factors that shape prominent features of the story are missing. In the McChrystal case, the user cannot discern the importance of, for example, how the pressures of command, or bureaucratic in-ghting, or different
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institutional cultures may have inuenced the crisis. The tag cloud uncovers only what is literally expressed in the data set. As one anonymous referee of this article noted, the disaggregated outputs from Wordle are no less typical than the results of virtually any type of content analysis; available tools generate inventories of props not plots. Conceivably, tag clouds value could be enhanced in the company of other tools for communication analysis. Possible amendments might include Yules Characteristic K, which measures the likelihood that two nouns (symbols), chosen at random from a sample of text, will be the same nouns. Consider a prospective application of Yules K to disparate blogs covering a topic of particular urgency. A nding of a relatively high K would indicate a high frequency of relatively few nouns. This would imply a honing in, by different bloggers, on the same or similar symbols. G. Cleveland Wilhoit (1969, p. 318) found just such a high K in tracking news reportage during international crises, with reporters concentrating on symbols of national community (U.S., American, nations, nation, and national). Conceivably, Wordle and other tag clouds could provide a visual aid to supplement outputs of Yules K and other measures of language richness in communication systems.14
Concluding Remarks Wordles tag line is beautiful word clouds and it is a self-described toy for generating such clouds. Its limitations for understanding the contents of complex communicationsand for policy research, generallymust be understood in this context. Nevertheless, we are reminded of various social media platforms founded for one set of purposes that evolved to meet many other demands. Even now, per the Top 20 Uses of Wordle, users are encouraged to use the platform for analytical purposes that go well beyond the crafting of beautiful images (Lucier, 2008). Consider, for example, a World Bank consultant who uses a tag cloud to show what the Twitter community has been saying about a new Bank initiative (Barton, 2010). Inventors of tag clouds, and specialists who are savvy at using these devices, are increasingly likely to enter the hallways of power and wealth to promote various organizational and societal aims. In addition to other cases mentioned in this article, founders of social media tools have been involved in projects ranging from optimizing the use of Facebook for political campaigns to paying policemen in Afghanistan via mobile phones (see, e.g., Lichtenstein, 2010). To document the emerging inuence of inventors of powerful, multifunctional social networking tools is to rediscover a facet of Lasswells skill revolutionthe: . . . probable shift of the dialectic of development from the class struggle to the skill struggle. . . . Intellectuals would appear in every coalition and make articulate the sub-myth of every ally (Lasswell, 1965 as quoted in Brunner, 2007, p. 193). In one variant of the skill revolution, what Lasswell alternately called the permanent revolution of modernizing intellectuals and the unnamed revolution, specialists collaborate directly with the state, with opinion makers, and with professional appraisers of policy:
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They often become consultants of public ofcials and private associations on public policy, the assumption being that they can assist in evaluating the signicance of specialized knowledge for the options open to decision makers in the public and civic orders. (Lasswell, 1965, pp. 878; see also Brunner, 2007, p. 197) Lasswells modernizing intellectuals form coalitions with state actors to advance disparate policy objectives and value outcomes. Consider, for example, that James Eberhard, founder of Mobile Accord, was a principal participant in the Text Haiti 90999 program. His efforts were in the service of securing well-being. However, at a symbolic level, he was engaged in promoting American humanitarian values and of justifying the instrumental uses of American power and wealth. By inventing and using social media, early adopters in organs of power, like the U.S. Department of State, have immediate and proximate aims, whether to promote free and fair elections, move funds to NGOs, or share and coordinate information among rst responders. Although these communication platforms have features of openness, allowing users to edit and amend messages they receive, skilled generators of content can get their messages out in front. Consider the two State Department ofcials who are advocates for social media and diplomacy: In 2010, their work included developing a social networking strategy for the U.S. Governments rst special representative to Muslim communities. According to one of the ofcials, key to the strategy was the identication of: inuencer Muslims on Twitter, on Facebook, on the other major socialmedia platforms. And we, in a soft way, using the appropriate diplomacy, reach out to them and say: Hey we want to get across the following messages. Theyre messages that we think are consistent with your values . . . Here are rich data for any student of Lasswell: the uses of diplomacy and propaganda as strategies for enlightening, persuading, and ultimately, reinforcing the vocabulary of the ruling few; the allusion to (and conceivably, illusion of) shared values and common purposes; the courtship of society by state via symbol specialists armed with advanced technologies. The ofcials remarks also suggest that, despite the oft-mentioned democratizing and me the people functions of social media, not just anyone on Twitter or Facebook is instrumental to an effective communication strategy. InuencersTweeters with numerous followers and Facebook personalities with thousands of friendsare vital actors. These key actors are Lasswells controllers in the communication stream. They may also become unwitting players in what Lasswell ominously termed, the Gnostic Revolution. In the latter, public faith in scientic positivism and Enlightenment values wanes and a demoralized citizenry becomes susceptible to fundamentalism and the fulminations of various pretenders to power (Lasswell, 1965). The concern here is that value outcomes from friending on social media may prove unfullling when compared with value indulgences gained from conventional friendships. If friends of prominent Facebook personalities feel used by the latterif followers discover that their online friends are shills for the ruling fewboth the friendship sours and the state loses respect.
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Our primary objective here is not to repeat the old saw that new technologies yield both good and bad outcomes. Early, anecdotal evidence about the uses of social media make that fact plain enough. Instead, our aim is to use Lasswells contributions on the science of communication, on social process, and on policy decision making to document the emerging inuence of social media in the public policy domain. Taking Lasswells advice, we examine these technologies in the larger contexts of the social and decision processes that determine value outcomes in state and society. We nd that social media are used now, and likely, in the future, to mediate public understanding of important events, trends, and decisions. Appraising the contents of e-communications carried on social media is aided by criteria such as dependability, selectiveness, and comprehensiveness (where social media tend to be at a disadvantage) and creativeness and openness (where social media show more potential). The consequences to various participants of using social media in public affairs are, as Lasswell might urge, dependent on the context, and the context is serviceably mapped with the social and decision process concepts. We offer provisional, analytical maps of social media in the professional lives of diplomats and other policy-oriented professionals, and we consider where these actors and their work t into the developmental constructs of contemporary and possible future political order. Among the ndings are indicators that architects of social media platforms and skillful users of these tools are recruited by powerful elites, and the motivations for the collaborations may or may not advance human dignity, depending on the context. Hence, the U.S. Secretary of State might persuade the owner of a popular microblogging platform to postpone site maintenance, thereby allowing microbloggers in Iran to keep up pressure on an oppressive regime. In contrast, state ofcials in China might hire hackers to inltrate e-mail accounts of dissidents or search for and block messages containing symbols deemed threatening to state legitimacy and one-party rule. We also discover that the actors in Lasswells stream of communications, when considered in functional rather than conventional terms, remain as relevant for analytical purposes today as in the days of wartime foreign correspondents and ofcial propagandists. Critically, the assumption that unltered intelligence (or advocacy masquerading as intelligence) ows directly, unmolested, from the uploader to the viewer is challenged by the reality of powerful intermediaries and inuencers who are the modern-day controllers that Lasswell envisaged, in functional terms. We conclude by noting that Lasswells concepts help probe the value dispositions of users of social media and illuminate the outcomes of processes mediated by social networks. However, widespread mastery of the technologies themselves is necessary to ensure that social media remain squarely in the overarching endeavor of promoting human dignity for all. Perhaps there is hope in that so many citizens of the planet are already skillful users of social media. Matthew R. Auer is Dean of the Hutton Honors College and Professor of Public and Environmental Affairs at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
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Notes
1. On the social media revolution, see Carvin (2009) and Levy (2007). 2. See Auer (2007) for a review and critique of reformulations of Lasswells decision process concept. 3. This article focuses primarily on social media, politics, and policy formation in state-dominated settingsfor example, in the arena of ofcial diplomacy. Lasswells decision process is applicable in both ofcial and unofcial or everyday situations. Regarding the latter, and as Michael Reisman argues in Law in Brief Encounters, a microlegal system operates at the societal level, governing myriad human interactions and relations (Reisman, 1999). These forms of real law may be more salient, on a day-to-day basis, than ofcial laws of the state. So while this article applies concepts such as prescription, invocation, and application to situations where power elites traditionally dominate, one can easily apply Lasswells toolkit in informal settingsthe very arenas where one might expect social media to prove inuential (consider the ubiquitous reportage on sexting, bullying via Facebook, and other e-mediated tests of societal norms). 4. Indeed, Twitters Terms of Service declares: We do not endorse, support, represent or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any Content or communications posted via the Services or endorse any opinions expressed via the Services (Twitter, 2010). 5. Lasswells anticipation of privacy concerns in the Information Age is striking. He writes, Although the issues are not in principle new, a data-rich world can have individual records of unheard-of detail promptly available. . . . It is conceivable that human beings will undergo general revulsion against the invasions of privacy that become more common as mans auxiliary brains are put to more and more detailed use (Lasswell, 1971b [reprinted from Lasswell, 1965], pp. 19293). Facebooks various missteps in tinkering with that sites privacy settings and poorly vetted changes to Facebooks information-sharing policies have earned scorn from users. In 2010, Facebook ranked among the bottom 5 percent of private companies in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (Newman, 2010)an ironic distinction considering that that same year, Facebook was among the most frequently visited web sites (Google, 2010). 6. President Obamas Twitter site ranked fourth with 7.34 million subscribers in the spring of 2011 (Twitaholic, 2011). 7. In appraising the credibility of the WikiLeaks material, the New York Times declared: It is sometimes unclear whether a particular incident is based on rsthand observation, on the account of an intelligence source regarded as reliable, on less trustworthy sources or on speculation by the writer. It is also not known what may be missing from the material, either because it is in a more restrictive category of classication or for some other reason (New York Times, 2010). These disclaimers underline the difculty that a mainstream media organization has in relying on non-mainstream outlets for information, and also, the Times ambivalence about the lack of comprehensiveness in its own intelligence function. 8. In the Iranian case, posts to electronic social networks, including Facebook, helped fuel antigovernment protests that led to an intense crackdown on demonstrators, and over the long term, severe restrictions on activities by potential troublemakers in universities and nongovernmental organizations. Comparably harsh responses to political activity via social media were common in 2010 and 2011 in the Middle East and North Africa. For example, so as to interfere with Egyptian social networkers role in planning a major antigovernment rally, the Mubarak regime temporarily shut down Internet service in January, 2011. Fearing an Egyptian-style social media-enabled popular revolution, Cameroon suspended Twitter service in the spring of 2011 (Keita, 2011). Elsewhere, in China, in 2009, the states chief censor and propaganda ofcial, Lu Changchun allegedly directed patriotic hackers to attack Googles web site; apparently, Mr. Lu had googled himself and found sites that criticized him (Sabbagh, 2010). Lasswell (1971a, p. 92) writes of nonprovocativeness as a criterion for effective policy invocation; such initiatives impose no more deprivations than are required (e.g., ofcials are nonabusive). Particularly in this latter case, drawing on Lasswell (1930/ 1977, pp. 173203), Ascher and Hirschfelder-Aschers observation seems especially apt that: the fundamental causes of stress and personality deformation lie largely in the deprivation of respect and human dignity (Ascher & Hirschfelder-Ascher, 2005, pp. 1634). 9. The author is indebted to an anonymous reviewer who notes that e-communications are not only more likely to excite impulses than reason but also to reinforce preexisting preferences. That same
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Policy Studies Journal, 39:4 reviewer notes that impulsive responses to stimuli can lead subjects to make rash and poorly informed decisions. Conceivably, e-communications could reinforce the DunningKruger effectthe phenomenon whereby unskilled or incompetent individuals are overcondent about their abilities in the very areas where they lack knowledge or make poor choices.
10. Even actors with preponderances of power and knowledge are susceptible to missing or distorted information carried on social media. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture red and quickly offered to rehire a mid-level ofcial, Shirley Sherrod, after excerpts of a speech by Ms. Sherrod appeared in a drastically edited form on a conservative blog. The excerpted speech presented a distorted view when compared with the unabridged presentation. The episode revealed weaknesses in the White Houses strategy to avoid distractions. The strategy backred, transforming a blog entry authored by, in the New York Times estimation, an activist-journalist hybrid into a multiday distraction from core policy concerns (Carr, 2010). 11. Stewarts complaints revolved around some of the same concerns considered in this article, namely the conation of entertainment and fact and advocacy dressed up as intelligence. This is not a new eld of enquiry in that explorations of the deliberate amalgamating of fact and ction go at least as far back as I.A. Richards (1929/2009, p. 262 passim) Practical Criticism; Richards wrote of the fusion (or confusion) between veriable facts and ctions. A dramatized rendering of the tension between news and advocacy was portrayed in the Oscar-winning drama, Network. Whereas the latter considers the hazards of news advocacy by mainstream media, the present concern poses comparable questions about social media. The author is indebted to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out historical treatments of these subjects. 12. So far, we have considered the role of social media in policy termination in the context of responsible and responsive government. However, Lasswell also developed far less optimistic projections for the human condition, and one can imagine a role for electronic networking tools in these contexts, too. In the unspeakable revolution (or transhumanity)one of the plausible futures (or developmental constructs) Lasswell envisaged for the composition and exercise of power by the ruling fewpolicy termination would be the privilege of super-gifted men, or genetically superior individuals (Brunner, 2007; Lasswell, 1956b, pp. 97677; Lasswell, 1965). Lasswells frightening unspeakable revolution is further animated by the possibility of social media, or more precisely, antisocial media, playing a facilitating role. Todays enthralled accounts of a single network (in this case, Facebook) wiring together a twelfth of humanity and merging with the social fabric of American life (Grossman, 2010) takes on a dark hue when reimagined as a tool of pure control. 13. For the policy analyst striving to make best use of e-communications on matters of public interest, the challenge is not merely the sheer volume of copy to collect, sort through, and interpret. It is also the rate of production of that copy and how e-communications themselves actually become part of the story. In Death to the Dictator! (Moqadam, 2010), which examines the disputed 2009 presidential election in Iran, the author writes, Cellphone cameras, Facebook, Twitter, the satellite stations: the media are supposed to reect what is going on, but they seem, in fact, to be making everything happen much faster. Theres no time to argue what it all meanswhat the protesters want, whether theyre ready to die (Moqadam, 2010, p. 67). 14. The author is indebted to Ron Brunner for pointing out possible applications of Yules Characteristic K.
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Source: adapted from Tang and Liu (2010, p. 1).

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